Ubuntu Touch Q&A 44

Post FOSDEM

26 February 2019

Show Notes

FOSDEM

We were at fosdem for a week, and then were sick for week. 1-3 Feb Brussels, Belgium.

Florian's Highlights

First time there, and there were a a lot of people there, and the trains were busy (Bad infrastructure for ticketing system.). Booths and sessions. Met a lot of people, and collected a bunch of business cards:

LibreOffice: document viewer for UT, loading time is high for libreoffice documents

Torporject: Can we integrate tor client into OS that is userfriendly with a nice UI.

Matrix: Presently fluffychat, and they were really hyping it, cutest and nicest client. Thanks to @krille

Xmpp: Jabber/XMPP client for UT? They also collected out card

NetworkManager: Currently on the phone is slow and kind of works. Thought it was interesting to have this on mobile. It would be nice to use the latest upstream version. IPv6 and wifi encryption detection. Currently this works on android, but on UT it doesn't really know what to do.

Belgian Waffles (best)

Matrix talk: French government uses matrix for secure messaging

Hopefully we can have a booth there. Lots of hardware things there

Marius' Highlights

Met Dalton for the first time. He is real.

Pine64

Debian

KDE

Socialize

Purism

Fixed Diogo's phone

Waffles!

Dalton's Highlights

Waffles !

Walk around Central Brussels

Walk in the snow to ULD

First thing PINE64 booth: tablet, pinebook pro,

Haiku CD!

Go to FOSDEM for Waffles

The Serious Part: OTA-8 update

We have some problems, and our original plan to update Mir to 1.1 and Unity8 will not come to fruition. This will affect the edge channel for qualcomm devices: graphical glitches, and app start failures.

Marius will be working on Mir. The problem is the binary blobs in qualcomm devices. It would be easier if it were open source.

The updates that we hope to include later, do show big improvements. There will be no more scopes after that point. Will they be back? not in their current form. We'll find a better solution.

Insights on PostmarketOS. Tips and tricks... Alan Pope from Canonical. Thanks for meeting with us at fosdem.

Questions

best place to ask: forums.ubports.com best place to complain: Dalton

Should we attend shows like FOSDEM as presenters rather than guests?

Yes. This year we didn't apply for a booth. We applied for a talk but didn't get accepted. Next year we would like a booth. Not many people know that Ubuntu Touch is still a thing. It would be important to have a continuous presence at the big shows.

Do you have any contact with Pine64 on the pine phone?

Yes we have a "small" amount of contact with them. Dalton shows devkit of the pinephone. Marius shows devkit running unity 8.

All of their hardware is based around the A64. We should not have trouble getting between all the devices.

There is a post about the tablet on the pine forum [https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=43850#pid43850]

Any updates on the Librem5?

We have contact with Purism, and they are going to be sending out the devkits soon. Maybe next time we will also be able to show that. They have a limited amount of kits, and have had some trouble with the hardware, so there are some delays. One of the issues was the screen, but it should be working.

What changes do we need to do in our stack to run Ubuntu Touch on the Pine phone?

The changes are minimal. The mir on mir needs a redesign. We can't do this because the graphics driver (Mali) are proprietary drivers right now.

What is the status of Anbox?

It has been put on hold for a moment. We need a proper base, and we need to update the more important part underneath (like Unity8) first. Halium also needs some work. Marius was working on other things at the beginneg but is working on more important things now. Unfortunately, more developers didn't come along to help push it along.

First work on the stuff that you don't see, and then we will get close to things that you see. Right now it depends on us upgrading Mir. This will help with performance.

What are the changes between updates on the Devel Channel?

We don't currently ship changelogs to every devel image. Watch the github repositories. Any changes will appear at the top of the list. Anything that gets merged in any xenial branch will get merged into the image. You will find most of the issues by using the phone.

When we change the infrastructure, we may have the ability to get automatic change logs. You can follow the issues on github https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/projects/3

QtQuickControls 2 doesn't have all of the tools that the UbuntuUi Toolkit has.

We are using both libraries. So a mix of QtQuickControls2 and the Ubuntu Ui Toolkit. It needs a group of people working on that. The phone needs a few things that are not part of the standard controls. Rodney is working on creating a new toolkit (Ergo), and Human Interface Guideline (HIG) Set for convergent apps. If completed, it would probably replace the UI tookit. Nothing will be removed now though.

For devs, use as much from the QtQuick Control as possible right now.

Is the Halium 7.1 build for the Fair Phone 2 available for testing?

Not right now. You could build it yourself by following the live porting session, but it's not ready for testing. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nShXVDXM50A]

We plan to do another live porting session where we left off.

Flo has started a port to Samsung S3. docs.halium.org has a good starting point, as well see docs.ubports.com. Documentation has improved a lot. There are more than 500 people in the Halium telegram group. [https://t.me/halium]